


Bonds

by zeldadestry



Category: Nikita (TV 2010)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:28:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One more day, he thinks, let us all have one more day of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bonds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slipsthrufingers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipsthrufingers/gifts).



It starts in Division, the dream - the nightmare, one that’s left Birkhoff’s body sticky with sweat by the time he wakes up - it begins at Division. He’s at his station but he’s working out a theorem, he’s trying to prove something, but he doesn’t know what, so it’s slow going. And then he hears, behind him, in front of him, all around him, really, someone calling his name, a woman. And he knows she needs him, so he pushes his chair away from the desk, he stands, and tries to follow the voice. 

Division’s become a labyrinth, he’s turning corners without any idea of what’s around them. 

There’s a sound, behind a door he passes, steady, but not Division’s usual mechanical hum. He stops, tries to remember the security code that opens it. Water, he recognizes, lapping against a brick wall, and he smashes his hand against the keypad until the door slides away.

Now he’s in Venice, but the canal’s running red, and he can see the woman, walking ahead of him. She wears a black cloak, with its hood drawn up, and he wants to go wherever she does, to step into the abandoned, vine-covered mansion she enters. 

She’s waiting for him, in the dim entrance hall, she’s standing at the foot of the stairs. And he’s psyched, approaching her, he wants to see her, and he thinks that they’re going to go upstairs together. Sure, the place is ancient and creepy and mildewed, but he hardly even notices that, so focused on her, and what she asks from him. 

Once he’s only a step away, he reaches out, his hand takes her shoulder and turns her around. 

It’s not who he wanted. It’s someone he never would’ve knowingly neared. It’s Amanda, holding a blade, and he knows it’s too late. 

  


Coffee. Strawberry waffles. He digs in at his breakfast and tries not to think. 

What’s the worst Amanda can do to him, anyway? He already knows, he’s already been there. It wouldn’t be her killing him, it would be if she broke him. If he gave information up, if he got someone he cares about killed.

No matter what Sonya said to him, about being unable to trust anyone, he doesn’t doubt Alex or Michael. And Nikki? If he doesn’t believe in her then all of this, the work and the risk, is pointless. 

He wouldn’t be the person he is today if he hadn’t wanted to make both Michael and Nikita proud of him, proud to call him their friend, their fellow, well, yeah, soldier.

He’s choosing to trust Sonya, for now. When will he know for sure that it was the right decision? He just prays that if he’s wrong he realizes it soon, in time to stop Amanda’s plans. 

  


“What’ve you got?” 

Nikita glances up from the screen she’s been staring at for the last ten minutes. “It’s not for work.”

Birkhoff grabs the tablet from her hand. “Swank digs. You looking to summer in Italy?”

“Shut up.” She lowers her voice. “Just sort of thinking, you know? About the wedding.”

“Well, look at you. Are you actually blushing?” He navigates the webpage, reading about the antique villa, located halfway between Florence and Siena. “It’d be a nice setting,” he admits. “You know, Florence and Siena were rivals at one time. Florence built its cathedral first and Siena decided to build one even larger.”

“To one up them?”

“Yup. Have you ever been to Siena?” He already knows she’s been on assignment to Florence more than once. 

“No.”

He brings up a photograph for her of the front of the cathedral, passes the tablet back.

“Wow,” she says. “Beautiful. I love the gold paint.”

“Drag your finger to the right.” He watches over her shoulder as more of the building comes into view. “Stop, just there.” He points at the solitary, unfinished wall. “That was supposed to be part of it.”

“So what happened? Why didn’t it get built?”

“The plague hit.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.” It’s just a coincidence, that his nightmare ended in Venice, and now Nikita wants to begin her married life in the Italian countryside. It doesn’t mean anything, and if there’s a sense of dread around him he can’t ever shake, well, what the hell, that’s just logical, right? Death and danger aren’t abstract for any of them. They look that shit right in the face but that doesn’t mean any of them should be dragging up reminders when they get the chance. “Sorry I ruined the moment,” he says. “Ignore me. Go back to being all swoony and ridiculous.”

“Swoony? Take it back.” She lifts her hand like she’s about to swat his ass.

He slides out of her reach. “Hey, easy on the goods.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You take it back?” He nods. She smiles smugly at him. “That’s what I thought.”

  


Of course he has sexual thoughts about her. Yes, he daydreams about fucking her. Who doesn’t? He’s reasonably sure, now, that it wasn’t because he’s easy to read that Amanda knew how he felt about Nikki. No. She recognized the want because she has the same one. 

More than just desire, though. So much more. To touch her the way Michael does, to know that his touch is always welcome. To sit, stand, stay beside her.

When she lived with him, just the two of them, together in the beach house, while Michael was away with Cassandra, that could’ve been a home. That was a home. And sometimes he wonders if he will ever be that happy again, if anything else will every satisfy him as much as that feeling of being one of the last two standing together, even against the rest of the world.

He watches her with Alex, sometimes, and there’s a part of him that longs for the kind of easy affection between them. He can’t take Nikita’s hand like Alex does, and Nikita doesn’t run her fingers through his hair and kiss the side of his head, like she just can’t help herself, like Alex is the most loveable being ever created.

And she’s never looked at him like she looks at Michael, like happiness exists because he does, like he’s made everything good, so that any shit that goes wrong doesn’t matter, as long as they’re still together.

  


“Don’t laugh,” Nikki says, the next time he catches her gazing at her tablet with that expectant, some sentimental schmucks might even call it hopeful, expression.

“I make no promises,” he says, but she lets him crowd in beside her and see.

“I kind of- that’s kind of what I want- I mean, for a dress.”

Botticelli’s painting, Primavera. Yeah, he can picture it, too easily, like something out of a fever dream, something he’d never let himself imagine unless he was high or bleeding out. Nikita finally just saying fuck it and showing off that angel inside her. Flowing dress, bare feet, flowers in her hair and gathered in her arms. He understands the difference between you are beautiful and you look beautiful. It’s like the time Michael called him a coward. He spoke to himself, afterward, the first time he passed by a mirror. ‘Alright, asshole, no excuses. You look like you would cower in a fight, everyone thinks you’ll be the first to surrender, but you’re not. You’re not.’ He probably wasn’t as brave, back then, but he’s had a lot of practice since. It’s not about no longer wanting to protect himself, no, it’s only about wanting other things more. “Not a bad choice,” he tells her, “but I’d much rather see you inspired by “The Birth of Venus”.” 

“You can’t be that desperate to see one nipple, nerd.”

  


There’s a moment, when he stands at the edge of the club’s dance floor, a disconnect when he feels both part of the crowd and above it, its observer. 

Nikita dances mostly with Alex, but occasionally a young guy will draw one of them away, try to keep up, and inevitably be left behind as they return to each other. 

“Must be something,” Birkhoff says to Michael, standing beside him, “to know that the only one she wants is you.”

“It wouldn’t matter even if I wasn’t,” Michael says. “It wouldn’t change anything. I mean, I might be jealous, maybe, but that would be about me, it wouldn’t be about how I feel for her.”

“Yeah, I know,” Birkhoff says. “I mean, I get it.” 

Nikita and Alex drift back to them at the start of the next song, a slow one. Birkhoff finishes his drink, leaves his glass at the bar, and lets Nikita lead him out onto the floor. 

It can be really nice to just be a mind, to get so lost in the puzzles he’s contemplating, to be able to take mysteries, places where other people have only wobbly conjectures, and make them solid, concrete. It’s more than that, it’s having both the ideas and the ability to implement them, those are the two sides of what he does that he loves most, answering the questions no one thought could be answered, and creating solutions to the problems people thought were unsolvable. 

But she’s always brought him back into his body. It’s something about how she lives in her own, how everything she thinks and feels channels into how she moves.

This is just the two of them, one of her arms around his shoulders, her other hand resting at his hip, like she knows how to work him, like she can make him into exactly who he’s meant to be. Her lips are moving, mouthing the lyrics of the song.

“I don’t know this one,” Birkhoff says, voice faded in the din, no matter that he’s speaking loud.

“It’s about a guy who’s searching for his better half, you know?” She sings to him, her lips brushing against the curve of his ear. “Turn on the lights, I’m looking for her.”

“Was it like that for you?” he can’t help wondering. Nikita tilts her head, confused. “You were looking for someone, and then you found them?”

Nikita’s eyes slide away from his own, fix on a point behind him, and he knows she must see Michael back there, still dancing with Alex. “No,” she finally says, as the song glides to its close. “I didn’t think I would ever have this. I still can’t believe I have this.”

He takes her hand at his hip into his own, holds it, close to his chest, his heart. “I’m glad you do.”

She kisses him, the corner of his mouth, the side of his throat. No intent, he knows that, blessings, more than anything else, and he accepts them, all the same.

One more day, he thinks, let us all have one more day of this.

  


“I need to talk to you.” 

“Ok.” Michael’s a pretty serious guy, Birkhoff knows that, but it’s still a little freaky to be the focus of all that grim determination. “1 to 10 scale, how bad is it?” 

“It’s not. If it is, well, I guess that’s up to you. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“Our lives, we all know it can be over any day, any hour. And I- I know, because I’ve been the one left behind, I know what it’s like to wish you were the one who died. And I don’t want- if anything ever happens to me, I want you to promise that you will do whatever it takes to make sure she’s ok.”

“Come on, Mikey. Give me a little credit. You know I will.”

“But I want you to promise me, you’ll put her first, before anything, until she’s alright again, until she’s standing.”

He thinks of Sonya, of lying beside her in bed, facing each other, just looking, until her hand reaches out to rest over his. He’s not deluded. He knows that making a promise to put one person over all others means not being able to make the same promise to anyone else. And the one thing that holds him back is wondering what Nikita would think about this. Give shit up for her mission, even the money that was intended to secure him a new life, sure, she practically demands it, but for her? She wouldn’t want him to do this, she wouldn’t want him to make any sacrifices just for her. But how can it be giving anything up when it’s what he wants, what he would do anyway? “I promise.”

Michael grabs on to Birkhoff’s upper arm, holds his gaze, and he’s not crying, of course not, but his eyes are glassy. “Thank you,” he finally says, voice rough.

  


He remembers a conversation he had with Nikki, a confession she made late one night, during that time when Michael was gone. 

“I didn’t deserve what I had with him,” she’d said, “that happiness, that comfort.”

“Damn- you’re a really, really depressing drunk.”

Nikita knocked her shoulder against his. “Vino Veritas and all that bullshit,” she said.

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think that- if you don't deserve to be happy? Then no one does.”

“You might be right about that,” she said, and left him alone, when what he’d wanted more than anything was that she’d lean against him, lay her head on his shoulder.

He was a part of the old Division. That fact’s not going to go away and it doesn’t matter that he was never on Amanda’s or Percy’s side because he still worked for them. They didn’t own him, and he didn’t follow them without question, but that’s not enough to wipe his slate clean. There’s no way to erase what happened, what they’ve done, not for any of them. 

  


“I got you something.” He holds the package in front of him, wrapped in silver paper, and Nikita takes it from him, makes a big show of shaking it. “Sort of an early wedding present.”

“Can I open it now?”

“Go for it.”

She peels off the paper, and pauses to admire the wooden box, to trace her finger over the pattern of flowers and birds carved around it. “Thank you,” she murmurs. “I love it.”

Birkhoff clears his throat. “There’s more inside.”

She nods, unlatches the box and opens it, flips through the dozens of packets of seeds inside. She’s smiling when she looks up at him, but she asks, “What am I missing?”

“I just thought-” He adjusts his glasses, like maybe they’ve somehow led him astray. “You might like a garden, later on.”

“Later on,” Nikita echoes. “Will you visit?”

“Of course.”

She leans in to hug him. “Then it’s perfect.”


End file.
